Bochco's Imagination Runs Wild In 'Critters'

TELEVISION

January 30, 1992|By Greg Dawson, Sentinel Television Critic

At a time when producers are slavishly custom-fitting their work to narrow advertiser demographics - women 18 to 49, kids 5 to 11, etc. - you have to admire the heedlessness of Steve Bochco's latest creation.

Capitol Critters, an animated series about rats and roaches living in the White House basement, has something for everyone, or maybe nothing for anybody.

Who does he thinks is going to buy commercial time on a show that crosses the mindless slam-bang action of a Tom and Jerry cartoon with the earnest political satire of ''Doonesbury''? Shearson-Lehman? Fisher-Price? Orkin?

Whatever Critters is supposed to be, it comes much closer to fruition than Bochco's last attempt at genre gene splicing, the intriguing but indecipherable Cop Rock.

ABC, which is in the midst of a 10-series deal with Bochco and thus eager to promote its pricey investment, is giving Critters the big send-off this week with three showings (three new episodes, no reruns).

It premiered Tuesday night just prior to, aptly enough, President Bush's State of the Union address, giving ABC sort of an upstairs-downstairs thing that night. Critters airs again Friday night at 8:30 (WFTV-Channel 9), then settles into its permanent time slot Saturday night at 8 o'clock.

There's a refreshingly mercurial, free-form quality to Critters - artfully contrived of course - that has these cartoon rats slamming (SPLAT!) into baseboards one moment as they flee the White House cats, and pontificating about pollution the next.

Written largely by Nat Mauldin (Night Court, Barney Miller), and lushly animated by Hanna-Barbera, Critters is loaded with sight gags alluding to previous residents of the house.

An overturned ''Nixon Is The One'' campaign button serves as a dining table. In the background we see a box marked ''hair dye.'' A rat rolls out a can of Billy Beer.

''We got tons of it,'' he says. ''It must have been on sale or something.''

Ultimately, though, it's not the sight gags, satire or slapstick that might keep you watching a show whose premise you would otherwise be embarrassed to describe in intelligent adult company.

As with Bochco's two best shows, Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, the key to Critters is a group of outrageously off-beat characters. (To those who say Bochco has no experience working with rodents and insects, I have two words: Arnie Becker.)

Playing the straight man (or mouse) at the center of this germy menagerie is Max, a wide-eyed innocent who fled east after his Nebraska family was wiped out by exterminators.

Voiced by Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.), Max is a bit of a knee-jerk liberal and pacifist who objects to assassinating the White House cat and insists on warning the rival cockroaches about fresh poison in the kitchen.

The quirky critters around Max include a radical peacenik named Berkeley, a jive-talking roach and a sardonic, chain-smoking mother rat. But the scene-stealer is the lovably addled Muggle, whose brain was fried when he was a lab rat in the '60s. (The role of a lifetime for voicer Bobcat Goldthwait.)

The chief White House cat is a snarling, slavering killer - Sylvester on steroids. But the ''V.P. Cat'' is an ineffectual bumbler who has Dan Quayle written all over him.

Yes, it's a strange world. There seems to be an Italian section, and at least one older Jewish couple, who quarrel about where to eat. ''How about under the sink?'' he says. ''I'm sick of under the sink,'' she says.

Maybe the most bizarre characters to show up in the first few episodes are what appear to be a pair of gay pigeons.

''Look at me, everybody, I'm a a B-17! The Memphis Belle!'' one of them coos while winging over the capitol.

In Friday's episode they try to pick up Max (whose sexual orientation has not been established). ''Need a lift, cowboy?''

The human characters, such as they are, are seen mostly from the knees down. Passing beneath two White House urinals in use, a dry-headed rat observes to Max, ''Secret Service agents - normal people don't aim that good.''

With Critters, Bochco has come close to hitting the bull's-eye. Now if we can only figure out what his target was.